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FLEXO
april
2010 www.flexography.org
The issue of environmental sustainability has become an
important topic of discussion in almost every industry
this year. Manufacturers in particular are being pushed
by consumers, government agencies, and supply chain part-
ners to communicate the environmental impacts of their prod-
ucts and to implement green practices. The package printing
industry has a prominent role to play in adopting sustainable
practices throughout the supply chain.
In 2009, MacDermid Printing Solutions sought to study the
environmental impacts of three different plate processing
technologies: digital solvent, digital thermal, and liquid plate-
making. But the company wanted to do more than provide a
study that recommended one single platemaking technology
as the most environmentally friendly solution. One solution
isn’t always the best solution, as some plates simply won’t
work for certain printers. This may be the case because of
graphic requirements, ink compatibility, or available equip-
ment footprint. And with today ’s business focus on sustain-
ability, certain environmental impact categories may be more
important to some businesses than to others.
Additionally, there is a need to determine whether specific
variables, such as geographic processing location, plate
gauge or plate size were material to the decision-making
process. MacDermid sought to develop an interactive tool
that would enable users to blend customer-specific variables
with a traditional lifecycle assessment (LCA).
Partnering with The University of Tennessee’s Center for
Clean Products1 and its consulting arm, Ecoform2, MacDer-
mid set out to develop a unique, spreadsheet-based tool that
would calculate the environmental impacts of photopolymer
printing plates’ manufacturing and processing technologies.
The Environmental Footprint Calculator developed for this
project computes a wide range of the products’ environ-
mental impacts and converts them to parameters that are
easy to visualize, such as the equivalent number of cars on
the road. Results can be employed to identify the tradeoffs
amongst different platemaking technologies, to select more
environmentally friendly processes, and to target opportuni-
ties for improvement.
METHODOLOGY & SCOPE
LCA methodology conducted for this study was derived
from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
guidelines.
3
Figure 1 shows the complete package printing
supply chain, with the red box denoting the processes within
Environmental Footprint Calculator
a New Tool Evaluates the
impact of plate processing Types
By Heather Barrett
• The Environmental Footprint Calculator computes a
wide range of the products’ environmental impacts and
converts them to parameters that are easy to visualize,
such as the equivalent number of cars on the road.
• Users can input their particular plate processing
location(s). This is important because the power
grids in different countries or regions contain vastly
different compositions of natural resources.
• Although solvent recycling has become a very ef-
ficient industrial process over the years, the use of
solvent inevitably expands the environmental impact
of platemaking, simply by its presence.
a new carbon footprint calculation tool can convey numbers in relation to easier-to-visualize concepts, such as number of cars on the road.
TEchNologiEs
& TEchNiquEs
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